Don’t shrink a girl’s world. Expand a boy’s morals

Within three days of the Astha Kunj rape , the Internet had its lessons ready.

A 17-year-old was allegedly gang-raped in the Delhi park on September 21 by three men posing as policemen . By the weekend, a former Army major was posting a video urging girls to master a CO2 air pistol. Lady Shri Ram College moved classes online after police and one of the accused exchanged fire near its back gate, and some students said their parents had asked them to come home. Karate, pepper spray, daylight hours, no parks, no going out alone. The list changes a little each time. The audience never does.

None of this is silly, and it helps to say so. A girl who knows how to break a grip and to trust her alarm has something real. The best evidence is a Canadian trial of first-year university women, where a course of four three-hour units brought down the number of rape cases over one year was lower for the resistance group over the control group . It was a taught course with practice, not a weekend karate camp. Parents who enrol their daughters after a case like this are using the only tool anyone has handed them.

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The trouble starts with what the tool is asked to do. In 2012, after Nirbhaya , the Delhi Police registered 706 rape cases and said that all but 26 victims knew the accused. At the same press conference, the commissioner said 8,180 girls had received self-defence training . Fourteen years later, the accused was known to the survivor in 96.8% of registered rape cases in 2024, out of 29,536. A punch to the groin is hard to land on an uncle, a classmate, or a boyfriend.

Look at who gets the homework. Girls get a curfew, a class and a route home. Boys get nothing. The Justice Verma Committee, set up after 2012, called rape an expression of power, and rejected chemical castration because it ignores the social roots of the crime. It also recommended sexuality education for children and childhoods that are not gendered . Parliament amended the criminal law, but years later Sabrang India noted that not all of the committee's recommendations had been implemented . Scroll through this week's advice and the education part is almost nowhere to be found.

Talking to boys is hard to do well, and the evidence is modest. In a Mumbai trial across 46 schools, cricket coaches were trained to talk to boys aged 10 to 16 about respect and about speaking up when friends harass girls. After a year, their players showed bigger gains in gender-equitable attitudes than boys with untrained coaches, and marginally less negative bystander behaviour . That is a study of attitudes, not a fall in rapes.

Meanwhile the burden slides quietly. On Monday, the Supreme Court took up the Delhi-NCR cases and said parks and buses cannot become high-risk zones through poor lighting and weak surveillance, calling it a systematic failure of law enforcement and administration . The Delhi Development Authority has ordered controlled entry after sunset, more CCTV and better lighting in its parks. Those are demands on institutions.

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After a medical student was gang-raped in Durgapur, West Bengal's chief minister said colleges should not let girls out at night , because they must protect themselves too. Advice like that carries an unspoken exemption. Someone stays in. Someone else keeps his evenings, his shortcuts, and his walk through the park, and is never asked to change any of it.

Telling girls to stay in is also the cheapest response on offer, since it asks nothing of the police, the DDA, or any man. A family that pulls its daughter out of a paying-guest room has acted. The man who was never told that a girl's silence is not consent has not been asked anything.

Teach girls to fight if they want to learn, and light the parks. Then put one more question beside every karate video this week: what is a 15-year-old boy being taught right now? If the answer is nothing, we have already decided who is supposed to change, and it is not him.

Amit Kumar works in the corporate sector, and writes on politics and society.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)